Hi guys.

I recently purchased a VPS running Debian 8, and I'm trying to run Icecast2 on it, but for some reason, as soon as I launch the program using the command: "icecast2 -b -c /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml", my CPU usage goes way up. Needless to say, this is bad, especially since it's a VPS.

I'm extremely new to Linux, and I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm learning. So does anyone know how I can fix this? I don't know if Icecast2 is just that resource intensive, and if so, is there something else that I can use?

Thanks for any information you mayb be able to provide.

Welcome to LQ, hope you like it here.


So what does "/etc/icecast2/icecast.xml" do?


You may think you're allergic to RTF(ine)M (and many new Linux users are under the illusion they'll hit the ground running anyway using a Web-based Control Panel) but really the first best thing would be to read the basic Linux user and admin documentation your Linux distribution provides. Before you get into stability, security, performance tweaking and such, it greatly helps to understand what it is you're running.


First of all you have to understand what you're running. For example an SSD may be faster than a moving parts disk (but that doesn't matter if the application is hogging memory). Also a lot of cheap hosting providers say they won't but overcommit anyway. That simply put means you won't be getting the (dedicated?) system resources you pay for. Secondly Linux does perform resource management very efficiently but you can not expect to run all sorts of resource intensive processes on one machine with just 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM. (Rethinking what you're doing is best but blindly adding more resources is almost always good.) Third there's basic tools to gauge what's the resource usage like various 'top' commands: top, htop, atop, slabtop, iotop, SAR, etc, etc (that's why you want basic user knowledge first) and Icecast also exposes details at the servers "/admin/stats" path. Finally it all depends on what you're doing because doing transformations is obviously way more resource intensive compared to "simple" streaming. So do see the Icecast docs and there's some load tests at http://icecast.org/loadtest/ that, while rather old, do provide insights in what is possible / required.

Any questions do ask but please provide tool output and details.

I need to agree with unSpawn and there are still other questions:
1. Are you sure about that? I think that is the expected behavior. I understand you do not like that, but obviously you started to do something and looks like that needs resources.

2. You do not need fully understand "linux" or "debian" but at least the command you executed. What have you tried at all? What is in that xml?

3. last but not least you gave almost no information therefore we will not able to tell you how can it be fixed. Even, I have no idea what should be fixed.